Chris,
I think that you have a winning strategy, but in the first game you chose - Dania G1 Jan 30 Sat Eve - ALL THE TEAMS IN 1-2-3 ARE LAME.
First, let's consider your judgement of the players. I would say it's good, except for one - in this case significant - error.
Urbieta in post 7 going into that game had 23 wins in his last 96 doubles games. Effectively tied with Jairo win-wise during that approx period. Best in the fronton. So 'Hot, hot, hot' for Urbieta instead of 'steady backcourt'.
However, there is way more to jai-alai than medium to long-term judgements of individual players.
Let's look at the team statistics. You keyed post 2 Jaime-Echeva and wrote, "the 2 is a great bet for place".
Well, their team record was 36: 1-2-3. You could not ask for a better Earth-to-Chris telegram, "This team does not do anything - ever." Echeva gets his wins, but not with Jaime. Jaime gets some WPS, but not with Echeva.
To me, this is one of the Classic Blunders in jai-alai handicapping. To take a junk team or player - one which for whatever reason is strongly not winning - and think that by putting other weak or weaker teams in their path they will somehow transform into a reliable performer.
An analogy might be an old man on his last leg in the ICU. He is unable to run an obstacle course and removing a few of the more challenging obstacles from the course is not gonna help. There is something intrinsically wrong with HIM.
This is really not all that different from what Tiger wrote, "If they're cold, they'll stay cold. Until they're not." Except that they are not cold, they are inept.
OTOH, your win in G 8 with Olate under Angel is definitely the way to go. You need an imbalance in the 1-2-3 and with Olate serving from post 1 against 2 less skilled backcourt opponents, you got it. Very similar to your G 5 win the other day with 81 Gorrono over Korta.
Finally, to get back to G 1 with the benefit of 20-20 hindsight.
Based on what I said about Urbieta, your grade of Laurent, and noticing that their individual G 1 records were:
Laurent 72: 12-8-15
Urbieta 98: 15-15-8 (both players make a habit of shooting out
of the box)
and your assessment of the extreme weakness (point donors) of the 1-2-3, we could think about choosing 7 as a win candidate.
In general, in a 7 pt game, when 7 wins, the top exacta is 74. So what we could routinely do for a post 7 choice is inspect the 1-2-3 and ask, is there any compelling reason to override that tendency? Of course in this case that is a joke. So, even though post 4 is also unappealing team stat-wise, you could still go with the general probabilities and cover 74, which impies 74/123 as well. That is what I plan to do in the future in games with this kind of alignment.
